The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (22 page)

PIXIE, JENNIFER’S ADORED GOVERNESS, READING ALOUD TO HER SEVEN-YEAR-OLD CHARGE AT OARE

Pixie became a trusted and capable part of the family, so much so that Geoffrey sometimes even asked her to perform some small task for him. Naturally, she became acquainted with the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, who was not only Geoffrey’s employer but a frequent visitor to Oare. One day (as the story goes), Baldwin fell ill, and Geoffrey took over, probably asking Pixie to help him with a few letters or phone calls. Then Geoffrey succumbed and took to his bed. And so it fell to the only available person to take over; plump-cheeked, pastel-clothed and always sweet-natured, Pixie suddenly found herself responsible not only for Britain, but for the vast areas of pink on the world map that she pointed out to young Jennifer – the Empire. ‘The Day Pixie Ran the Country’ became a favourite Fry family fable, and Pixie was always happy to laugh along with them. Later, when Jennifer was grown up, Pixie worked as a companion-secretary for Alathea’s maternal aunt, Lady Victoria Herbert. A god-daughter of Queen Victoria, Aunt Vera (as she was known) disliked men, never marrying and employing only female servants. She wore floor-length lilac dresses, matching stockings and ermine tippets well into the 1950s. Pixie reported that once a vicar came for tea who was known for having an affair with a local farmer’s wife. Afterwards Aunt Vera asked that all the sofa covers be removed: ‘A bad man has been sitting on them!’

HEN JENNIFER WAS ABOUT TEN, she was sent to Miss Wolff’s Girls’ School in London to bump up her education a bit and prepare for senior school. She also received elocution lessons. Pixie remained as her governess and constant companion. Located just off Park Lane, Miss Wolff’s was rather smart and scholastically exacting. Vita Sackville-West had been a pupil there twenty years earlier, as had her future lover, Violet Keppel (later Trefusis). Jennifer won the English literature prize (a copy of Poems from Kingsley), as she wrote to tell her mother from Oare, where she spent weekends and holidays. At about this time, the Frys bought Sloane House in Old Church Street, Chelsea, an elegant Georgian house with a ballroom and a spacious walled garden. Peaceful and light, it had been an asylum for ladies ‘suffering from the milder forms of mental disease’ in the mid-nineteenth century – eminently suitable for a lady with a delicate disposition like Alathea.

N 1928, JENNIFER was kitted out in gymslip, navy coat and gloves and driven each day from Sloane House to St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith. She asked the family’s chauffeur to let her out of the Rolls-Royce before they arrived, so she would not be seen as different by her fellow pupils. St Paul’s was a highly academic school, where girls were expected to study Latin, the three sciences and scripture as well as French and the more usual subjects. The future actress Celia Johnson had just left the school when Jennifer arrived and the music master was Gustav Holst – a shy, retiring man, who had already written The Planets during the First World War, but who preferred the anonymity of teaching to celebrity and public exposure. Jennifer neither enjoyed nor excelled at her school life, provoking her father even more by failing to live up to his hope that, even if she were not a boy, she might succeed at her studies. She was acutely aware that he considered her stupid.

It was just before Jennifer started at St Paul’s that her beloved Aunt Evelyn got married to Evelyn Waugh. Evelyn was Alathea’s youngest sister who had borne the brunt of not being a boy – the last hope for the Burghclere title. Given a name that would have done for a son, she was neglected by her parents even more than her sisters, and as she grew up she flung herself into the post-war party scene, often dressed as a version of the son her parents desired. The ideal female figure of the times was anyway veering to the androgynous – corset-less, flat-chested and lean, with ‘naked legs’, sleek swimming costumes and cross-dressing tendencies. With her ‘Eton crop’ haircut, exquisite choirboy’s snub nose and petite frame, Evelyn was the perfect 1920s girl. She used lipstick, smoked shamelessly and liked sailors’ clothes; her attempts to remove herself from parental control had led to her making and then breaking nine previous engagements. Some saw her as annoying, with her whimsical ways and cute slang, though the fact that she called Proust ‘Prousty-Wousty’ said something about her reading habits as well as her manner. Her mother was not amused when her youngest took up with the emerging ‘middle-class’ writer who shared her first name. After an investigation into his Oxford past, she declared that Waugh would drag his wife ‘down into the abysmal depths of Sodom and Gomorrah’.251 Waugh himself declared that he had always believed himself a gentleman until he met his future mother-in-law.252

The two Evelyns, whom Nancy Mitford described as looking like a pair of fresh-faced schoolboys, got married in secret. The bride wore a black-and-yellow jumper suit, Harold Acton was best man, Robert Byron gave the bride away, and they drank champagne cocktails at the 500 Club afterwards. When Lady Burghclere did find out she was ‘quite inexpressibly pained’.

‘SHE-EVELYN’ WAUGH, JENNIFER’S AUNT

The newly-weds were known by their friends as She-Evelyn and He-Evelyn and they dashed about to the sort of parties that Waugh would dissect with loathing in Vile Bodies and were written about in all the fashionable gossip columns. She-Evelyn had several bouts of bad health, as He-Evelyn described to Harold Acton, writing from Oare. ‘The last 3 weeks have been very distracting with Evelyn in bed and my flat in possession of nurses and doctors. We have got away at last and we are staying in my brother in law’s house in the downs near Marlborough in great peace and luxury.’

In his diary Waugh noted his amusement at finding Marie Stopes’s Married Love fallen down behind the architecture books in a small study. He also commented on the atmosphere of the house: ‘There is an epicene preciosity or nicety about everything that goes better with cigarettes and London clothes than my tweeds and pipe.’253 Some months later, when She-Evelyn got double pneumonia and was critically ill on a Mediterranean cruise, it was Alathea who wired them money.

Two of Evelyn’s sisters had already made disastrous marriages (Juliet’s had lasted twenty-four hours and Alathea’s relationship with Geoffrey was hardly contented), but Waugh was devastated when only fourteen months after the wedding, he announced the shocking news ‘that Evelyn has been pleased to make a cuckold of me with Heygate* and that I have filed a petition for divorce’.254 Waugh confided in the writer Henry Green, ‘There is some odd hereditary tic in all those Gardner girls – I think it is an intellectual failing more than anything else.’255

The separation lost She-Evelyn many friends, including Nancy Mitford, to whom she had been close and who had stayed at Oare with her. The other ‘Gardner girls’ took their sister’s part, and when Jennifer gradually learned the details, she believed that her youthful aunt had come out badly from the scandal. Evelyn claimed that she had married Waugh believing he would help her get away from the depressing restrictions of upper-class life – the ‘huntin’-shootin’-fishin’’ brigade with their snobbish cliques and narrow obsessions. In reality, her husband appeared to be mesmerised by the aristocratic environment she disdained, and wanted nothing more than to belong to these circles – something even his friends teased him about, and that emerged in his subsequent alliance and fascination with the Lygons at Madresfield, not to mention his penchant for the grandest London clubs.

S A TEENAGER, Jennifer continued to feel the physical and emotional awkwardness that had dogged her childhood. She had fabulous legs that she was proud to show off and what she considered an embarrassingly large bosom that she tried to disguise. As she developed a sexual awareness of her own, she also began to understand more about her parents’ complex relationship. In Jennifer’s unfinished short story about Jane, there are strong clues as to how she discovered Geoffrey’s secret: ‘When Jane was fourteen, her mother started confiding unsuitable stories about her love affairs, her husband’s homosexuality. It explained the presence of certain ambiguous young men in the house, her mother retiring to her room.’

Geoffrey’s rejection of his daughter and his lack of interest in his wife reflected not just a cruel and misogynistic streak, but a fundamental attraction to men. Jennifer began to notice how many young men came to visit and to stay – some of them students from Oxford, others involved in the political world. Eventually, she deduced that some were his lovers. Jennifer’s Aunt Evelyn later claimed that on one occasion Alathea had ‘walked in and found Geoffrey in bed with a boy’. Although Evelyn was unspecific about the age of the boy, the shock of witnessing what was, after all, a criminal act was inevitably severe. It can only have served to make Alathea feel even more unwanted and unhappy.

Geoffrey’s work as private secretary to Stanley Baldwin meant that he aligned himself with the highly conventional Conservative leader, whose influence in the decades after World War I was such that some called it the Baldwin Age. First cousin to Kipling, Baldwin was a generation older than Geoffrey – a representative of the old, rural England that had been rejected by many of Geoffrey’s blood-spattered contemporaries, disillusioned by war and its aftermath. Significantly, however, Baldwin’s elder son, Oliver, was homosexual, and Baldwin was a close and loyal friend to Lord Beauchamp (Coote’s father) and lived close to Madresfield, where he was a frequent visitor.

GEOFFREY FRY: BOOKISH, BISEXUAL AND COLDLY CRITICAL OF HIS WIFE AND DAUGHTER

It was Baldwin who made Geoffrey 1st Baronet Fry of Oare in 1929 for his contribution to politics. Nevertheless, Geoffrey was cut from different cloth to his employer; a sensitive man who was interested in the arts and who had a strong sense of classical elegance. While his work propped up an old-school political system and social world, his personal leanings were influenced by his homoerotic impulses and his love of the ancient world and poetry. His obsession with Rupert Brooke was only one indication of this. Sir Geoffrey also invited a stream of cultured literary and artistic people to Oare, and commissioned work from Eric Ravilious, who painted some beautiful watercolours of the gardens and some fashionable murals of tennis players for their London house. Jennifer remembered that Ravilious had taken quite a shine to her and her mother, which annoyed Geoffrey.

Jennifer realised she would never live up to her father’s expectations. His love of the ascetic and of classically orientated young men only emphasised her girlish frivolity and her increasingly feminine figure. While Geoffrey hoped she’d be studying Latin verbs in the library, she would be sunbathing on the roof terrace, and if he hoped she might at least take after her mother in terms of wafting, delicate sophistication, she’d be bursting out of a sexy frock, ready to go to a party. Jennifer’s closest friend was Primula Rollo – a blue-eyed, fair-haired classic English rose. Prim lived near to Oare, in a house called ‘Cold Blow’. Geoffrey had commissioned the building from Clough Williams-Ellis for Prim’s parents, who were his friends – her father was a solicitor and worked for Geoffrey. Although Prim was two years younger than Jennifer, she often joined schoolroom lessons with Pixie. As they got older, the two girls would go to dances together, sometimes chaperoned by Pixie, whom they would shamelessly mislead so they could get up to mischief – although Prim was not as naughty as Jennifer. If not exactly prim, she was the kind of teenager who was chosen to be head girl at her boarding school. Jennifer did not get anywhere near being head girl. ‘I had Latin verbs drummed into me, as well as Mathematics at St Paul’s Girls’ School. All I longed for was to learn Italian, study Ballet and lead my own life,’ she wrote. After less than four years at the school, she left just after her sixteenth birthday.

When she asked her father if she could study Italian, he replied, ‘Whatever language you learn you will speak stupidities, as you do now, in your own language.’ Instead, Jennifer was sent to Vienna to learn German, accompanied by a toothy young governess – a vicar’s daughter – to keep bashing on with the Latin lessons. If Geoffrey hoped that this trip would drum some sense into his flighty daughter, he had misjudged her capacity for adventure. Jennifer’s frank and witty description of her experiences gives a picture of how she blossomed away from home.

JENNIFER AGED ABOUT SIXTEEN

I stayed in a family who took me to their hearts as my parents were incapable of doing. We sat round their Biedermeier table drinking china tea with lemon and a dash of rum, ate Sacher Torte and filling Austrian meals. Wiener Schnitzel, sauerkraut, the best potato purée. They took me to concerts and the opera – my first introduction to Wagner – The Ring in its entirety – where I met my first lover … He was a Hochgeboren [highborn] count – a painter – and he asked if he could draw me. I was a pretty dark girl with slender legs, and wore flat red shoes with ankle straps which were unusual and admired. He painted me half naked in a kimono and re-christened me Kotoro. He saw me as a Geisha, and I was flattered and enchanted by his attentions. As I had never been allowed so much as a sip of wine at home, I was easily seduced. Also by the elderly uncle of the family, a kindly roué who put an arm round my waist on the one occasion I was alone in the salon, kissed me, gave me a glass of Liebfraumilch, and there I was on the Biedermeier chaise longue, my knickers skilfully removed, being really made love to for the first time.

… I floated from cathedral to café, on to a gallery and then to my rendezvous as a Geisha. There in his studio, my kimono hung on the side of an Art Deco screen, I was soon in it – at first primly draped as a Japanese virgin, then one breast exposed and then taken on the floor in various positions.

Escaping the governess was easy – Jennifer just said she was going to a museum or a shop, and the new-found freedom was intoxicating. When the Viennese sojourn drew to an end, she begged her new family to keep her on, weeping each night with dread of returning to England. Like Gerald many years earlier, she had begun to discover new pleasures far from home, released from her family’s expectations and repressions. Gerald had also been sixteen when he went to France and began to develop into the person he wished to be. Although Jennifer’s experiences might have been more daring, they both shared a powerful sense of awakening. Such was Jennifer’s misery when she left that she became sick and feverish on the journey home. On her arrival in London she was put to bed ‘without seeing my parents, who had unexpectedly gone to the south of France’. When Geoffrey and Alathea returned, the governess was dismissed for neglecting to supervise her charge, although Jennifer never learned what they found out.